This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - The Stress Paradox: Why We Need Stress (and How to Make It Work for Us) with Dr. Sharon Horesh Bergquist | 294

Episode Date: March 26, 2025

Stress—it’s everywhere, unavoidable, and, if we’re being honest, usually the enemy. But what if we’ve been thinking about it all wrong? What if stress isn’t just something to manage but something we can leverage? Today, we’re flipping the script on stress with Dr. Sharon Bergquist, an award-winning physician, researcher, and expert in lifestyle medicine, stress science, and longevity. She’s been featured on Good Morning America, CNN, NPR, and The Wall Street Journal, hosts The Whole Health Cure podcast, and has over 6 million views on her TED talk about stress and the body. In her new book, The Stress Paradox: How to Live Longer, Healthier, and Happier with Stress, she unpacks how the right kind of stress can actually make us stronger, healthier, and more resilient—if we learn how to use it correctly. In This Episode, We Cover:  ✅ The difference between good stress and chronic stress—and why we need the good kind ✅ How stress impacts brain health, aging, and longevity ✅ Five key stressors that shape our physical and mental well-being ✅ Practical strategies to harness stress so it strengthens you instead of exhausting you Stress isn’t the villain—it’s a skill. When we stop fighting it and start using it, we sharpen our focus, build resilience, and improve our long-term health. Let’s make it work for us instead of against us. Connect with Dr. Sharon Horesh Bergquist:  Website: https://drsharonbergquist.com/  Book: https://www.amazon.com/Stress-Paradox-Longer-Healthier-Happier/dp/006334596X LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thegoodstressdoctor  IG: https://www.instagram.com/thegoodstressdoctor/  X: https://x.com/TheGoodStressDr/status/1895568273963384878  FB: https://www.instagram.com/thegoodstressdoctor/  10 Simple (And Affordable) Tests For Your Health & Longevity (FREE) https://drsharonbergquist.com/10-tests-to-extend-your-healthspan  Related Podcast Episodes: 181 / Stress Less and Fear(Less) with Rebecca Heiss How To Breathe: Breathwork, Intuition and Flow State with Francesca Sipma | 267 Toxic Productivity with Israa Nasir | 254 Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

I am Nicole Kalil and you're listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast where together we're redefining what it means, what it looks and feels like to be doing woman's work in the world today with you as the decider. Whatever feels true and real and right for you, whatever lights you up from the inside, that's your definition of woman's work. And when I think about you doing your version of woman's work and me doing mine, I got to tell you, I don't intend for it to include this endless cycle of stress, exhaustion, and burnout.

Sure, stress is a natural part of life, and yeah, there are some seasons where we have to push through. But I don't believe chronically overwhelmed and running on fumes was ever supposed to be part of our job description. So today, we're going to talk about stress, but from a different angle. Not just how to manage it, but how to make it work for us, how to leverage it, how to tell the difference between good stress, yes, that's apparently a thing, and chronic stress, how to reframe our relationship with stress

so it actually benefits us. I know, my brain is spinning too, but if stress is gonna show up anyway, and let's be real, it is, then we might as well learn how to make it work for us instead of against us, which is exactly why I'm bringing in today's guest, Dr. Sharon Burquest.

She's an award-winning physician, an expert in lifestyle medicine, and a researcher leading groundbreaking studies on stress, longevity, and brain health. She's been featured everywhere, Good Morning America, CNN, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, and is the host of the Whole Health Cure podcast. And her TED Talk on how stress affects the body has racked up over 6 million views. Translation? She knows what she's talking about. So, Dr. Sharon, welcome to the show.

And let me start with this sort of long-winded question. Your book presents what seems like, at least to me, a counter-intuitive take on stress, that it's actually necessary for our health. Can you help me wrap my brain around this? Because I don't know, like my whole life I've been told that stress is bad, which makes me feel stressed about being stressed. And of course, it doesn't feel good to be stressed. So walk me through the science here. How is stress actually a good thing? And it is a very counterintuitive thing, Nicole. So as you just mentioned,

the narrative around stress that we have is that stress harms and for good reason. There's a lot of medical evidence literature supporting exactly that. But there's just as much evidence supporting the fact that stress not only at a certain level does it not harm us, but we take off. It actually enriches us and it helps us grow. And what the stress is doing, and the kinds that I'm talking about are brief

intermittent stress, but what it's doing is that it is building resilience. It is literally reconfiguring our mind and body to a happier and healthier state. And the counterintuitive part, the paradox, is that we actually need these good stressors to build resilience against the harmful types of stressors that we're trying to avoid. So a new way that we should think about stress management is not just avoiding the harmful stress, but to optimize the stress in our life.

Like you said, we want more of the good stress to build our resilience. And yes, we want to curb the harmful stress, but we also don't want to avoid all stress. And we want to get over this fear and the stress of being stressed because not all stress harms. Okay. So, this often happens when we have a guest who takes something that I've thought one way about my whole life and poses it as my brain starts spinning and I feel like I'm working hard to catch up.

So, I heard what you said and it makes sense and my brain is still like, what? So can you give some examples of what brief intermittent good stress looks like versus this sort of chronic, ongoing, never ending stress that I think most of us think of or experience in our lives. Sure. Well, let's first talk about what is stress, right? So stress is anything that throws our body out of a natural balance that we call homeostasis. But one of the most fascinating learnings from stress biology is that we actually don't

recover back to the state that we were at before we encountered the stress. When we recover, we're either netting benefit, so we're becoming resilient, or we're netting harm. Okay, and this is where the different stressors make a difference. The types of stressors we're used to, kind of the kinds that make us feel stuck, right? Bad relationships, difficult job situations, those are the kinds where we net harm. And the brief intermittent ones that I'm talking about aren't just emotional experiences, right? Stress can be physical, it can be chemical, it can be the foods we

eat, it could be exercise, right? That is what the brief intermittent stressors are. There are things like phytochemicals in our foods, high intensity interval training, using heat and cold, intermittent fasting, as well as certain types of cognitive and emotional challenges. The common thread here is that they're all stressors and they all work on a gene system

that has been passed down to us generations from our ancestors called the vitality genes or vital genes. And anytime anything is conserved through 2 million years of our human history, that's nature's way of saying this is critically important. And what the good stressors do is they activate these genes. And these are the genes that encode our natural body's ability to defend against the things that are harming us today. Right? So these genes are repairing our DNA, repairing our protein, recycling old and damaged cells, they're recharging our energy and creating good energy through

our mitochondria, they're growing the neural networks in our brain and helping us literally rewire our brain to a higher state. So when we're talking brief intermittent, we're saying these are stressors that are intense for a brief while, generally in a mild to moderate range, but brief onset and then recovery. And this recovery piece is the key, right?

Because we only think about stress, but when we get in the pattern of we expose ourselves to stress, then we recover. That is how we're reconfiguring our bodies and our minds to get stronger and healthier. Okay, I wanna talk about the recovery part because I think that's what most of us are missing. But to sort of recap,

what I'm hearing is when we experience stress, mental, physical, emotional, wherever it comes from, our bodies, when they deal with it, come back to a different place, not the same place as before. And the question is, is whether our stress is netting benefit or netting harm, is whether our stress is netting benefit or netting harm, and that we absolutely can choose, pay attention to respond to these healthier, intermittent stresses in order to net benefit and recovery as part of it. Did I recap that in any sort of way that made sense? Yeah, I mean, that's exactly the case.

So really what we're doing is we're taking back control of our health by choosing our stress. So if we are again, thinking of stress in this bigger umbrella of all these other things that are not just emotional and cognitive stressors, but think of all the things that are making us sick today. Like it's no secret that the rates of chronic disease are rising, that we're getting sicker and these diseases are hitting us at a younger age, right?

We're living in a sick environment and this is the predicament of all of us, right? So the question is, what can we do to build our defenses? So much of the things that are harming us, things like processed foods, being sedentary, loneliness, the chronic stress, we know that we need to avoid these, right? These are harmful and so much of health advice is how do we curb these and appropriately so. What we're talking about here is how do we mitigate the harm? How do we take control and actually build health? And this is what we are trying to do by choosing good stress. It is very hard to avoid the harms because our bodies are actually wired to see these things, right? The

reason we eat processed foods even though we know they're not good for us is because fat, sugar, salt release dopamine, right? And this dopamine triggers our reward system. So it's one thing to know we shouldn't have them, but our biology draws us towards them. So it is very hard to fight that instinct. When we're choosing good stress, we're actually working with our biology in a very natural rhythm. That is what our ancestors did for millions of years. The problem is in

today's society we have removed these natural stressors. We don't have a need to have high intensity exercise. We don't have a need to be fasting. And we are not really, really resisting the harms that are happening every day, right? So we're a bit out of balance. So on any given day, there are about 10,000 injuries to our DNA, which is profound, right? Seven times a minute. But our body has this basal level of repair that's happening where we're repairing the DNA.

If we didn't, we would be dead in, I mean, days, right? And this basal level is not enough to counter the harms that are happening every day. And if we aren't activating our body's natural defenses to repair the harm, we're out of balance. And that's what's happening. That's why we're becoming more vulnerable from the lack of good stress in our life. OK.

I promise, listener, that I'm going to ask a lot about this, but before I do, I want to go back to recovery because I think we live in a world of push through, grit, grind, yes, mentally and emotionally, but also physically. There's so much focus on pushing past certain points, but there isn't a lot of talk about recovery. So tell us what we need to know about that as it relates to good stress and being able to handle all the things that life throws at us. So the recovery, like I said, it's the critical part, right? There's a yin and yang. This is peanut butter and jelly, right? Stress and recovery. Because when we undergo the stress, our bodies go into this hunker down, stress resistant mode

where we're doing all these repair and housekeeping functions that we're talking about, repairing the proteins, recycling different parts of our body. When we go into recovery, that's when we're doing the remodeling, the reconfiguring and the growth. So if you're going through the stress without the recovery, you've just put yourself through stress and you're not giving your body the opportunity to actually benefit and grow. Worse yet, when you're stacking even a good stress without the recovery, you're making

it a chronic stress. So the way to keep the stress in the range that we want for growth, which is this mild to moderate amount, is to keep it brief, intermittent, and then recover. So yes, the recovery part is key. That is what we are not doing enough of. We're really good at stressing ourselves. We're not very good at making time for the recovery. Could you give us some examples of ways that we might fit recovery into our days? I know so many people are like, oh, I'm too busy, right?

Are we talking about meditation, sleep, deep breathing? What are some examples of recovery that we should be focused on? So there's so many types because we're expanding stress to beyond the cognitive and emotional. So everything you talked about is wonderful for emotional stress and sleep in general helps repair our body systems. But if the type of stress, for example, is fasting, then the recovery is eating nutritious meals with protein, with fiber, with phytonutrients. If the stress is heat exposure, recovery is just letting your body naturally cool off.

If the stressor is a high intensity interval workout, the recovery is, well, sleep, as you just mentioned. That's when our body does a lot of the growth post-workout. So it's different, but the key is that we can't just stack the stress one after another. And for example, if you decided to fast, but you did it for such an extended amount of time, there's a certain point at which your body actually can, it doesn't feel as good, right? You start to break down certain muscles and things if you're not getting the adequate

protein input. So what you want to do again in all of these is to find the appropriate recovery and make sure that you are not skimping on that whatsoever. And there are ways that you can biologically measure this. I mean, if a person is really into their fitness and wears a wearable, you can look at your heart rate variability and see what that's doing.

You can look at your basal heart rate, but you can also just have a simple knowing, right? Like how do you feel after the stress, right? You just ask yourself that. have a simple knowing, right? Like how do you feel after the stress, right? Just ask yourself that. If you feel exhilarated, energized, motivated, that is a good stress and you did not push it too much and you gave yourself time for recovery. If you're exhausted, dulled, just fatigued, okay, that probably wasn't the best stress or you didn't have enough time for recovery. So there's simple ways to just pause,

ask yourself because some of this is just an inner knowing if something is working for you or not. So I love that big fan of listening to your inner knowing across the board and this simple statement of is it working for you or not. We're so inundated with messaging about what works for one person, right? And then it's sort of always put out there of like, this is the one best way, one size fits all solutions type thing. And I'm so happy to hear how important this element is of checking in with yourself.

Does this work for me? Did this work for me? How am I feeling after? And sort of trusting those natural instincts. Okay, so your book, The Stress Paradox, kind of details five key stressors. And you've mentioned several of them already, but I just wanna kind of go through them

so everybody gets a sense of what we're talking about. So what are the five key stressors? And how do we choose the right type and I'm gonna say dosage in air quotes of these stressors for ourselves? Yeah, so the five main types, which are hormetic stressors, that's what we're talking about here. And hormesis is from this Greek word to excite.

So what these all share in common is that they can benefit us. So there're the plant chemicals, high intensity interval training or workouts using thermal stress. So that's either cold. It doesn't have to be a cold plunge. It could just be a cold shower, heat, fasting, but in a circadian pattern. And I'm going to call it actual normal eating. And I can explain that. And then good mental and emotional stress. And we can spend a lot of time differentiating that because I think that is so important to differentiate from the type that we naturally

associate with kind of stress. So those are the five main ones. And the reason again I've picked these is the commonality is that these are the stressors that were in our environment until about 200 to 300 years ago, until our lifestyles have changed so dramatically. And our physiology has come to depend on these stressors. And that is why removing them from the fabric of our lives today is creating harm. Okay, so let's talk about each of them

in a little bit more detail. So first, you used a different word, but plant toxins, is that? Yeah, so plant toxins are phytochemicals. So phytochemicals are plant chemicals and they are the part in plants that give us a lot of the health benefits, the anti-inflammatory benefit, the antioxidant benefit. They're kind of the humble heroes.

You hear a lot about the stars, the protein, and the fiber. But these are the heroes that are protecting us against disease. And the reason plants make phytochemicals is it makes them stress resistant. If they're exposed to drought, to UV light, to pests, they make phytochemicals because they're natural pesticides. They make the plant stronger. When we consume the plant, we are getting the stress resistance benefit from the plant. It acts actually as a toxin to us because that is really they're made to be pesticides, but our bodies have developed these elaborate ways to break down the toxin into an amount that's stimulating but not harmful. So it ramps up our antioxidant defenses, it ramps up our

anti-inflammatory ability, it ramps up our DNA repair processes. It ramps up our ability to make mitochondria and good clean energy in our body. So the plant's response to stress in their environment is actually creating a stress for us that's benefiting us and making us healthier. And we spend so much time around food thinking again, what should we be avoiding, right? We know we should be avoiding sugar. We should be avoiding certain kinds of processed foods. And yes, that's important. But here we're talking about what are we not adding enough of? And when you look at large-scale studies, there was a global burden of disease study that looked at 195 countries over 27 years. And they found that diet was the single biggest cause of mortality worldwide. But most importantly, it was because of the foods we weren't eating enough of rather than

the foods that we were getting too much of. Okay, so when you look at the mortality caused by sugar compared to the mortality caused by not getting enough plant food. There's over 30 orders of magnitude more mortality worldwide from not getting enough plants, right? So one out of 10 Americans is getting enough plant food in their diet. We know that there are over 250 population-based studies that say if we get the recommended amount,

we can reduce our risk of cancer 50%. We are leaving so much on the table by not getting these non-negotiables of our physiology. We've got to get the basics down to live a happier and healthier life. So if I'm thinking I want to get more of those into my body, what would be like three to five things I should have on my shopping list? Yeah, so generally you can't go wrong with fruits and vegetables because there's certainly phytochemicals that are well researched that create this hormetic or beneficial stress response.

But to kind of keep things simple, you want fruits, vegetables, you want to get legumes as much as you can tolerate them because they're harder on some people than others. Whole grains, nuts, seeds. Those are the big things and then spices are an extra benefit. You really just want to add. You can have any dietary pattern, whatever you prefer. This is not saying you have to be entirely plant-based. You can have an omnivore diet, but just add plants so that you are getting the benefit of the stress response and upgrading your biology to be more defensive. Okay.

Now, let's move on to high intensity workouts. Yeah. So, across the board, we are all struggling to get the recommended physical activity. And even more so for high intensity exercise, I think that that's something that drops off. But the reason we need the high intensity is because the adaptations we get to stress depend on the intensity of the stress. So the higher the spike in cortisol, the more adaptations and benefit we get. And that sounds a little counterintuitive again,

because we're taught to think cortisol bad, cortisol is not good for you. But here we're really triggering a rapid, brief spike in cortisol, which is very different than the chronic high level of cortisol from the chronic stress. When we get the spike, we are creating adaptations that are telling the mitochondria in our bodies, which are again the energy producing part, to make more energy and to make it cleaner energy, because we're recycling the mitochondria to be healthier. So there's less kind of free radical emissions that are polluting our bodies.

That intensity is key. And if you look at all people who are meeting the physical activity requirement through moderate activity, so going for a brisk walk, but not getting the intensity, about 40% aren't building cardiorespiratory fitness. Okay. And We don't talk about cardiorespiratory fitness enough. It's different than physical activity guidelines. Cardiorespiratory fitness is your aerobic capacity. The reason it is so important, it is the single biggest predictor of mortality across the board, hands down, with orders of magnitude, more than even chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease, even more than cancer.

There are studies showing that it's a better predictor of mortality than your age. That's profound, right? Let's think about it. Our respiratory fitness can predict our mortality more than our age. And to really push the limits on our aerobic fitness and this cardiorespiratory fitness,

we've got to hit these peaks of high intensity so that our body adapts to this higher level. Okay, so again, if you could just give us a small handful of examples that might help us hit this peak. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I will tell you, one of my favorite things to do is, again, all of these are simple everyday things because, like most women, I am working full time.

I have three children, right? So I've got to think about how do you incorporate this into your life? And I think about good stress like medication, like how do you dose medication? And I think, okay, what's the lowest dose you could have to get the maximum benefit? And in the case of this vigorous or high intensity exercise, you want VILPAs. It's really an acronym, V-I-L-P-A. That stands for Vigorous Intermittent Lifestyle Physical Activity. So one study of over 25,000 people, they followed them for seven years, they found that people who get one to two

minutes of these brief bursts of physical activity at least three times a day have about 40% lower mortality from cancer and about 50% lower from heart disease. So really profound. And what that looks like is it's not even exercise, it's running to catch a bus, it's running up a flight of stairs, not even exercise, is running to catch a bus, is running up a flight of stairs, just incorporating these short one to two minute bursts. So I think it's something that we can all do, but we have to think that we've got to just push, if we want to get the benefits of stress,

we have just got to get out of our comfort zone. 100%. And my brain is like, I can do just about anything for one or two minutes. So like, we can do this, right? Okay, let's go to thermal exposure, hot and cold. You said it doesn't have to be a cold plunge, which is music to my ears.

And my grandmother, for as long as I can remember, talked about doing just like a one to two minute cold shower. It feels ancient and wise, but anyways, what are we talking about here? And that's exactly it. Again, brief stress response. So zing cold shower, 30 seconds. And it doesn't even have to be a cold shower at the end of your nice, lovely warm shower.

Just turn down the tap to cold setting. Do that for 30 seconds. Come out. That's enough to get the stress response, which raises your dopamine. lovely warm shower, just turn down the tap to cold setting, do that for 30 seconds, come out. That's enough to get the stress response, which raises your dopamine. It raises the norepinephrine level, keeps you motivated, it energizes you, and it starts this whole cascade of all these benefits that are building your defenses against disease. Fasting. What I mean by fasting here, and I think we have to be so careful with the terminology.

People think of these long drawn out fasts. What I'm really advocating is for people to do what, like I said, was normal eating. We're eating over a 15 hour day. Our body needs time to do the housekeeping, to do the repair. We have to go 12 or more hours to get our bodies to switch from a growth phase, when we're utilizing these nutrients to store energy, to a repair phase when we're doing the housekeeping.

So when we are not going at least 12 hours without food, we are impairing our body's natural ability to heal. And what we need to do is just do that. And if we go beyond that, we get some additive benefit. So this is really normal eating. It's aligning our bodies with our circadian biology. Our body likes to ramp up and gear up earlier in the day to get us ready to think, to eat, to metabolize,

to do all the daily functions. At nighttime, it wants to unwind, repair, and to get ready for the next day. And we are not allowing our body the downtime to do the work that it needs to, to get us ready for the next day. So we're essentially kind of, again, holding our bodies back and we've just got to get out of the way

of our own physiology and our own ability to do this healing work. So what I'm taking away is at its most basic level, just don't eat for a 12-hour period, right? Absolutely. That is the most basic level. And if you can go a little bit longer, you do start to get more benefit. And if you can align your meals where you're eating more earlier in the day when your circadian biology is really gearing up for that. And later at night, not eating most of your calories after dinner because that clashes with the normal rhythm of your body.

Okay, great. Now I think maybe the one we probably could spend a lot of time on is the psychological emotional stress. Yes, yes. Hardest one, right? is the psychological, emotional stress. Yes, yes. Hardest one, right? Because these others are tangible and they're so concrete and this one is less so. But stressors that are purposeful, meaningful, generative,

so part of something bigger than us that help other people, release a different set of biochemicals in our brain. For example, there's a reward pathway, the mesolimbic pathway that releases dopamine. When we're doing something purposeful and intentional, we're getting a higher amount of that. When we're doing something generative that's helping others, we're releasing oxytocin. We're also releasing endocannabinoids. So the biochemistry of our stress response is

different with stressors that fall in that bucket that are beneficial. In fact, these hormones, the oxytocin, the dopamine, the endocannabinoids, they're actually countering cortisol. They're regulating our stress response. So rather than fearing all kinds of stress indiscriminately, if we can choose these good stressors and get the biochemical benefit from these good stressors, we can handle the stressors that we can't control. So the harmful stressors are chronic, they're unpredictable, they're very different than these types of stressors.

These are deliberate, we're doing them in a safe way, right? We can control how much we're going out of our comfort zone and we know when we need to pull back and recover. So that is the key difference. And one of the most important things for everyone to think about and take away is that we don't have to fear stress when it's in the pursuit of reaching our dreams, of doing the things that we want to,

you know, as women, I think we tend to be nurturers and we are doing so much for others. And we are not taking the time to build that resiliency through these good stressors and pursue them. And when we do, we change the energy in our body. We literally, I mean, from quantum physics, we know that we have an energy around our body. We literally, I mean from quantum physics, we know that we have an energy around our heart. And when we are building ourselves to be more

resilient through these good stressors, we are changing this energy that attracts instead of repels, that inspires creativity instead of fear, that inspires calm instead of chaos. In one way we can support our family, the people we love, everyone around us is to invest it in ourselves. I think that, as a woman, I think we think that's still, selfish, self-care, whatever we want to term it, but that is how we influence and create a positive virtuous cycle where we lift others up in ways that are so far beyond

the words that we're speaking or the actions that we're taking, it's just an energy and we need to invest in building that. I don't know why I'm, I was almost tearing up while you were talking. I think there's something that my inner knowing said, yes, that is what we're talking about here because I think with stress so often, we miss what I'm hearing as a crucial part, which

is asking the question to ourselves, does this matter? Does this matter to me? Does this matter to the people I love the most? Does this matter to my purpose? Does this matter to my vision? Because what I'm hearing is when the answer is an emphatic yes, yes, we might feel stress, but it impacts us in a healthy, positive way. We get the benefit from it.

Whereas, I think what we're doing is our to-do lists are never ending. We're saying yes to everything without thinking. We aren't checking in with this crucial question of, does this freaking matter? Am I on track with what you're saying? Absolutely. See, I believe that we all have the potential to live a better life.

But going through stress is just an inescapable part of this growth. But we have to choose the stressors that build our growth and to curb the ones that make us feel stuck, right? That is the new stress management. And we don't need to get rid of, quote, all the stress in our life. We just have to optimize stress, right? It's a reframe of how we're thinking about stress.

Okay. My last question is, I think sometimes we have a tendency to justify things in our own mind or excuse them. Any ways that we can check in with ourselves if we're justifying or excusing bad stress instead of focusing on what could be good stress. Is my question making any sense? It does, Nicole. And I think a lot of that is, again, reconnecting with our bodies and reconnecting with how

we feel. And we know it, but we're suppressing it cognitively, right? Because when we are doing something that is aligning with our belief system, we are just jumping out of bed. We're motivated. We're so excited to do the work. And when we are doing something we have to, we're kind of dragging our feet and we will do it,

but we just know that, oh, this just sucks the energy out of me. And I think the more we tune know that, oh, this just sucks the energy out of me. And I think the more we tune into that, we start putting our energy in ways that create energy. Right? And that's what we want. We're putting energy into things that are taking away energy. And that's the key at the end of the day.

If you don't feel great, you don't feel incredible, well think about how you're investing your energy, how you're creating the stress in your life and what are the ones, I mean, there's some that are non-negotiable that you can't remove, but you can always choose good stress to create the energy to carry you through these bad stressors that are weighing you down. Okay. So again, kind of my takeaway is the pre-question of does this matter to me? And then maybe the post-question of how do I feel now?

There are many things that I do that honestly do drain me of energy, but I feel great. I feel proud or I feel like, you know, that it was a good thing. And then there are things that I just feel like crap. I feel like shit after. And if I'm being honest about it, I think just the checking in with ourselves is really what's missing and being honest with ourselves

about how we're feeling and paying attention. So, okay, Dr. Sharon, this conversation has been fascinating. Like my mind is blasted. And we almost all overguess author books, and I cannot possibly read them all, but the stress paradox is absolutely one I'm ordering right when we are done with this and reading.

Thank you for this conversation, for your incredible work, for writing this book. And listener, you can also go to drsharonburquist.com where you can find the link for the free offering of 10 simple and affordable tests for your health and longevity. That's on her website. Again, the book is called The Stress Paradox. Go out and order it right now. her website. Again, the book is called The Stress Paradox. Go out and order it right now. Dr. Sharon, thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Okay, friend, I'll be honest. My brain is still spinning a bit, but if there's one thing

I'm taking away from this conversation, it's that stress is a skill. We need to do the job, but it's not the job. It's a tool, not the whole damn toolbox. And when we learn how to use it the right way, it strengthens us instead of breaking us. And here's the best part. You get to write your own job description. That's the whole point. That's what I mean when I say woman's work. You decide what belongs, what doesn't, and how you want to show up. Stress may be part of the equation, but it doesn't get to run the show. So let's you want to show up. Stress may be part of the equation, but it doesn't get to run the show. So let's use it to our advantage. Let's let it sharpen us, not exhaust us. Because knowing when to push, when to rest, and when to rewrite the rules

all together, well that is woman's work.